Sports Information Department

I was just curious as to what people thought about working for a Sports Information Department. Is the pay, hours, acutal work, etc. generally better/worse than working for a newspaper?
It seems like it wouldn't be a bad gig, especially if you worked for a major D-I school, but I don't know much about the actual job, so that may not be the case.
If there are any previous threads about this topic, please post.

And you ARE working for the school, so unlike a reporter you can't tell it like it is. And some coaches treat SID's like their personal secretaries, and I couldn't deal with the ass-kissing involved in it.

I've often thought it might be an interesting job, Brookerton. And I was rather close to applying for SID at my alma mater a year or two ago before I realized I couldn't really justify the pay cut.

At a D-II or D-III school, the pay, even for the main job, isn't all that great. And if you want to land at a D-I school, understand that there are a lot of kids who go through college training for just that position. That's your competition.

One thing you have to have, and a lot of people don't, is a full understanding of publications and desktop publishing. Producing media guides, game notes, etc., is very big, and you're going to have to handle a lot of things, even the little stuff like who produces the head shots and how you plan the page-by-page flow of a media guide.

One of the most difficult things is that SIDs have the same hours as newspaper sports writers (game nights, then working furiously to publish gamer/stats/notes to the website and send to all media outlets), but at a lot of schools they're also expected to be there for the 8-to-5 like the university employees they are.

Sad thing is at most schools the SIDs only get paid about two-thirds of what the PR people in University Communications make. How that is justified I will never know.

At some smaller schools, SIDs also serve as the equivalent of a traveling secretary -- book buses, sometimes drive a van, all in the sake of getting the team moved.

Unless you somehow managed to snare a couple good student assistants every year -- and the good student assistants who want to get into sports information will go to a bigger D-I school, in all likelihood -- your life as a small-school SID can be hell.